Women 40 Percent More Likely than Men to Develop Mental Health Problems

When it comes to crazy shenanigans, let's face it-men usually take the cake as the culprits for the most outrageous behavior. But according to a new analysis, women are more likely to have mental health problems than men.

The findings, based on analysis of epidemiological studies from the UK, US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, has significant consequences for public health, according to Prof Daniel Freeman, who said that as millions of people in the UK alone were affected by mental illness, the consequences of gender disparities were widespread. Mental health campaigners said GPs needed to be aware of such disparities when deciding how to commission resources for treatment and support.

Freeman's study notes that women are around 75 percent more likely than men to report having recently suffered from depression. To add to that, they are around 60 percent more likely to report an anxiety disorder.

The statistics show that men, on the other hand, are more likely to report substance misuse disorders than women. These conditions include things like ADHD and schizophrenia.

As the conditions most affecting women were more commonly seen in the analysis than those affecting men, overall mental health conditions were more common in women than men by a factor of 20 to 40 percent.

The result is based on analysis of 12 large-scale epidemiological studies carried out across the world since the 1990s, for Freeman's new book The Stressed Sex, published by Oxford University Press. The analysis used only large-scale studies, which looked at the general population, to control for men being less likely to seek help for psychological disorders than women.

However, while pre-set criteria were used to select which studies to include and exclude, the research is not a formal meta-analysis, regarded as the gold standard of evidence.